I believe that the majority of any western civilization by now uses P2P.

That the majority may still feel dishonest about it is for the same reason people used to feel guilty about their sexuality: because forces bent on exploiting them for their obedience were out to have them manipulated so.

Witness our local trolls as prime examples.

So assuming just as much honesty will be brought forth about the fact that sharing is part of the human essence, just as sexuality is(what other is consensual sex but sharing each other without asking money in return), then the majority of “ordinary people” cannot feel it is dishonest.

Therefore, there is no case to be made against (file)sharing.

Basically RM is afraid that people might actually be exposed to culture and learning without being artificially restricted by how rich they or their family are.

See, it is his worst nightmare that one day people might actually be able to have access to information and knowledge REGARDLESS of their income and actually be able to even the odds of the eternally widening scissor between rich and poor.

What an inhuman thing, to wish to profit from knowledge and culture.
We are are all utter sc*m.

Obvious troll is obvious.

Never bought one since it was shut, and will never pay for a piece of music ever again.

If he made all that money, i’m glad! he provided a service that nothing legal has ever matched since.

1) If money was donated for website and the structure than that seems fine. He work hard to create a system that sustained life of torrents and created a great community. He did what apple was trying to and recently succeeded. (Create an amazing digital library of music.) But they were the first. It looks to me that his case is weak unfortunately because the law allows the music industry to become rich for poor distribution but frowns upon a man that circumvents the system and makes a good distribution system. I think he deserves any money made but I am pro little guy.

2) Time is money – An old saying but it holds true here too. Alan spent time to set up a system for people to share. The argument that he should not get money for this crazy. You file sharing purist must be to young to know the value of money. Unless you mom still feeds you and gives you a roof you need to make money. I think the what oink and the other torrent sites out there offer is invaluable and private sites offer much more value than public ones because of the membership factor they can enforce rules that force leeches to be good sharers.

I hope Alan wins but to say he wasn’t aware that people were uploading torrents of music to share through a product that he created and received donations for… well that is a stretch.

Justice doesn’t defend fairness in the USA, that’s not really a news…

But it shows once again that you only defend the idea of monetary value, not of cultural value.
I won’t start the argument of capitalistic mythology, I think I know it fairly well because I have always worked in top management environments.
The method is to scream loud enough until people are convinced it’s the truth, like Bernays or Goebbels used to do.
So I’ll leave you to your pathetic babbling, because it is obvious you’re just here to repeat the fallacies you are paid to repeat.
Why wasting your time here anyway ? Go to the house of representatives, with the other hundreds of biased lobbyists and preach your friends with your money.
The public is wrong, since you decided so. So be it, we’re more and more numerous to be wrong, then.
Until we’re right, and that will happen, no matter how much money you invest in lobbying. That’s a cheering idea, to say the least :)

when this concept [ of value ] is accepted………

I have inconvenient news for you, there is no “when” about it and Ellis’s court case is the point. The basic concept of value, and indeed, giving value TO RECEIVE value has been an organizing tenet since the first caveman traded something he made for something he wanted that someone else made. The internet changes distribution, but nothing will change the basis of barter.

When you take a pilfered copy of a digital product–no matter what it is–you gain the value of its possession while giving nothing in return. You cheat the concept of the barter. That’s why it is against the law. If this is hard for you to comprehend, tell it to the judge when your time comes. The courts will explain to you what any 4 year old kid can understand.

He’s from Milli Vanilli?

The value you’re talking about is not limited to single individuals.

I learn from other people, that gives me value. My choice to create art or not to create art from my learning.
So a consumer learns when trying an album, the same as an artist uses the “value” he got from others to create one. (I hate this monetary term, and I perfectly understand why you use it, because when this concept is accepted, the concept of defrauding can be introduced.)

And if I go to a restaurant, and they serve me something uneatable, I can have it changed. In a cd shop, once the wrap is open, I would be said “no, sorry, we don’t know if you didn’t copy your cd, so we won’t refund”.

I’m not a redneck, try to answer without 4-yo kids arguments.
On that topic, I won’t be punished. I could be fined or harrassed, but unfair punishments are called abuse.

To prove the ‘conspiracy to defraud’ they have to prove that he deprived them by fraud of money to which they were entitled. How do they figure that donations gleaned for running a tracker/site are owed them, much less owed to musicians. I do not see the connection.

People made music. Man ran website. Other people share music through website. Some donate to Man for running of website. OK.

How the HELL do website donations “rightly belong” to anyone but the site admin?

IF he defrauded donors by making personal profit from money he promised to spend on site administration, the donors may have a case for fraud.

The industry has no case for fraud as they have no valid claim to website donations. The reason these people are claiming “conspiracy to defraud” is that the definition is vague enough. They know they have no legitimate case, but that wont stop them from prosecuting, and usually, from winning either.

I fear this case will lead to another horrible legal precedent being set by the music industry.

Good Luck, Mr. Ellis.

And try before you buy has been discredited for years, if you can’t listen to it legally now, you aren’t trying. The amount of free try-before-you-buy music on the internet is staggering, so there’s no intelligent reason to break the law by infringing anymore.

But if you keep infringing, at least when your punishment arrives like Ellis you’ll know it was fair because at the very least, you’ve made an informed choice and will live with the consequences. Do you also refuse to eat at restaurants where they won’t allow you to taste a dish before you actually order it?

Inviting the media to organised crime busts is common in Britain. It certainly wasn’t just the BBC that were there.

The defence will then have their opportunity to put forward the case from Alan’s side/perspective.

The jury will have to be satisfied “beyond reasonable doubt” that Alan and others conspired to defraud others. If all twelve members can’t reach a guilty or not guilty verdict, it would go to a majority decision, which is normally 10/2 and if then still no verdict is reach it would be a hung jury and a re-trial may be required.

Did Alan set out with the intent of making the music industry lose money or simply to make music more accessible?

Be making copyright stuff available for free right or wrong, he has been charged with “conspiracy to defraud” and I think that is where the music industry/CPS might have shot themselves in the foot and maybe if he’d been charged with something else, it would have been easier for them to prove categorically.

Go to a “culture” supermarket, they don’t offer listening anymore, as they used to some years ago. And independant cd shops who were offering that disappeared.

I personally own more than 3000 cds, buying 10-30 a month. Some I don’t even unpack, since I already have them on the computer.

Maybe I’m just an exception, but for the other ones I don’t buy, I wouldn’t buy them anyway, since I don’t buy what I can’t try.

Now the major issue : is someone really profiting from copying a cd in mp3 format ?
When I was a teen, I was spending my days copying my friends’ cds/tapes to tapes. Then to cdr.
Many of my friends only had cdrs, but they were going to concerts. Or replaced the radio with their “illegal” (not immoral) cds.
We already pay taxes when buying cdrs, hard drives, usb keys. So I guess it’s just fair enough.

Also, I never buy majors’ stuff. Not my taste. Sorry, it could be harder than you think to ram down all that crap products (errrm. Big labels Artists’ music. Sorry. No offence ;) ) down my throat.

To conclude, as a file-sharer, I condemn Oink’s admin if he ever made a profit out of it. It would have been easy just to close down donations when servers/bandwidth were paid for each month. If he kept stockpiling donations, then he must be sentenced.
But that doesn’t mean that filesharing is bad. People who share on emule, soulseek, dc, don’t make a penny from their sharing. They are just helping friends to see/hear stuff they couldn’t see/hear otherly.

I’d be very surprised if they haven’t already fessed up a lot of user ID’s.

Lets not jump to conclusions just yet – at least the jury will be waiting until the end to consider the evidence properly.

Trial by media?

I swear they’re just trying to ‘make an example’ out of him.

You’re forgetting who we’re talking about here. These are OiNK users lol. These are the kids who listen to “bands that don’t even exist yet”

Not to mention there were 180000 users, and the minimum donation was 5 pounds. so 37,641 users would have had to donate the minimum. That’s only 21 percent of the userbase. That sounds about right.

but why is a difference of opinion like @54 who is obviously in the minority here called a troll

You guys are so one-eyed… a little bit of balance and seeing the other point of view is a good thing too!

Obvious troll is obvious.

Definition of “conspiracy to defraud”, the offence with which Ellis is charged:

http://tinyurl.com/5bvydz

Interesting excerpts:

Defrauding
———-

“to defraud ordinarily means… to deprive a person dishonestly of something which is his or of something to which he is or would or might but for the perpetration of the fraud be entitled”

Dishonesty
———-

“A jury must first decide whether according to the ordinary standard of reasonable and honest people what was done was dishonest. If it was not dishonest by those standards, dishonesty cannot be established and the prosecution must fail”

“If it is dishonest by the ordinary standards of reasonable and honest people the jury must then consider whether the defendant himself must have realised that what he was doing was by those standards dishonest”

“It is dishonest for the defendant to act in a way which he knows ordinary people consider dishonest, even if he believes that it was not dishonest or he was morally justified in acting as he did”

Jurisdiction
————

At common law, a conspiracy to commit a crime abroad cannot be prosecuted in England if the purpose of the conspiracy is to defraud abroad, even if there would be, for example, incidental loss or damage to a company or individual in England as a result of damage abroad”

Implications
————

There seem to be several implications arising from the definition of the offence with which Ellis was charged.

The Google Defence
——————

Ellis claimed when he was arrested that his site was no different to Google in the respect that it provided links to copyrighted material but did not actually host the material.

If the jury deem such practices not to be ‘dishonest’ in the sense outlined above, then the charge of ‘conspiracy to defraud’ will fail.

However, I would suspect the the prosecution will contend that the ability to locate copyrighted material on search engines such as Google is incidental to the main purpose of such websites. They will suggest, conversely, that locating copyrighted material for download was central to the aim, or indeed the sole aim, of Oink and other services like it, and therefore dishonest.

According to jurisdictional limitations (above), companies and individuals represented by the RIAA or other American based organisations cannot be the victims in cases of conspiracy to defraud charged in England – hence the reason why this case was brought by the British or international equivalents, IFPI and BPI.

Does this mean that a site like Oink which offered copyrighted material for download which infringed only the rights of companies based abroad would be immune to prosecution under conspiracy to defraud?

Aggravating factors
——————-

The facts that pre-release material was available and such seemingly large amounts of money were raised from donations seem to weigh against a successful defence argument in any event.

Watching with anticipation…

On Topic:
No independent research that might let the jurors have an opinion based on facts not the fictions presented by the prosecution? Seems fair to me. /sarcasm

The sums discussed here – donated over the years – PROVE that people are happy to pay for downloading music.

Get with the times, you irrelevant, obsolete fat-cats of the publishing industries.

either that, or just please FOADIAF…

“When I am king you will be first against the wall

With your opinion that has no consequence at all”

T.Yorke “Paranoid Android”

Should be the motif of bloggers on this site.
Disagree with us and you’ll be shredded and , quite possibly, SHOT